


i'll give it to someone special

by theclaravoyant



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Coming Out, First Kiss, Gen, Love Confessions, M/M, Multi, Mutual Pining, Pre-Relationship, Season 3 UA, first kiss au, slight tweaking of the timeline because it's christmas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-24 16:40:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22001101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclaravoyant/pseuds/theclaravoyant
Summary: David is putting up fairy lights when Stevie stumbles across a gift to him from Patrick. It's a mix CD, but it only has one song. What could it possibly mean?An alternate coming out/love confession/first kiss for David x Patrick loosely in the vicinity of a slightly tweaked S3, inspired by a holiday prompt list.Title from "Last Christmas" by Wham.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer & Stevie Budd & David Rose, Patrick Brewer/David Rose, Stevie Budd & David Rose
Comments: 13
Kudos: 164





	i'll give it to someone special

**Author's Note:**

> A combination fill of the prompts:  
>  "You made me a Christmas playlist but it’s just Mariah Carey’s “All I want for Christmas is you”. I can’t tell if you’re hitting on me or if it’s a joke."  
> and  
>  "I was putting up Christmas lights, and I literally fell into your arms"  
> from [this OTP Advent prompt list](https://theclaravoyant.tumblr.com/post/189588155676/verobird-christmas-prompts-some-i-made-up-some)

When decorating, it was no secret that David Rose was an advocate of “if you want something done right, do it yourself.” This went double for the holiday season; with bright, clashing colour schemes in abundance, there was too much potential for a garish, tasteless disaster for him to allow an amateur to take over. He had a business and a reputation to maintain after all – plus, it was either this or the end-of-year budget review, so really, the jobs divided themselves.

At least, they did until the bell rung.

“Patrick!” David called, so that he wouldn’t have to be deterred from his process, not to mention make the inelegant descent from the stepladder in front of a member of the public. “ _Pat –_ oh, it’s just you.”

Stevie fixed him with a sardonic glare.

“And a happy Hanukkah to you too.”

David rolled his eyes, and made a point of turning his back to Stevie and continuing to thread out the fairy lights as she made her way further into the store. But he couldn’t quite turn all his attention back to the task at hand – especially not once she passed the counter behind him, and made a curious humming sound.

“What’s _this?”_ she wondered, and David pretended he couldn’t hear the scandalous intrigue in her tone.

“Patrick and I exchanged some small gifts,” he explained matter-of-factly, “to celebrate our first holiday season together – as the store.”

“Uh huh.” Stevie was audibly unconvinced.

“Excuse you, Christmas is a busy time for retail,” David scolded, whipping around and rocking the step-ladder – damn, he’d forgotten it was missing a foot. But he pinched a nearby shelf, righted himself, cleared his throat and did his best to continue as if his blunder had never happened. “It’s important to keep up morale.”

Somehow, Stevie kept a straight face. “Morale.”

“Yes.”

“So, Patrick made you a mix tape… for morale?”

“… Yes.”

“Great! Let’s listen to it then, shall we? For your morale.”

Stevie’s eyes were fixed on David’s as she pulled the CD slowly from its case and slipped it into the side of David’s computer. David knew she was challenging him, but what could he do, object? She already knew he doth protest too much when it came to Patrick, but if he had any chance of coming out of this relationship – by which of course he meant this _business relationship_ \- without a broken heart, he couldn’t afford to stoke the fire. And apparently, there was no way he could so much as flinch on this infernal step ladder without shaking the whole damned thing and giving himself away, so though his heart clenched with a dizzyingly cruel hope that the mix tape might open with some kind of confession, he stood stock-still. Waited. Until those precious, familiar xylophone tones began to chime.

_“I-I-I-I… don’t want a lot for Christmas…”_

His heart almost buckled with relief. Stevie smiled slightly.

“The man’s got taste,” she praised. More sarcasm? David wasn’t sure.

“He’s learning,” he replied, and turned his back to her again to continue with the work she had so rudely interrupted. If he had to press his lips tight to keep from smiling, so be it.

-

 _“Patrick!”_ David called from the front room. “ _Pat-“_

He cut himself off, falling to a mumble that was too muffled by the distance and the walls between them to make out. Whatever he had said was met with a flat, but equally muffled reply from what Patrick had long since learned was Stevie’s voice. Part of him wanted to pop out and say hi, but their Q4 turnover was hard to keep up with… and then, any hopes of getting up the courage to leave the back room fizzled when the first notes of _All I Want for Christmas_ started playing.

Patrick took a deep breath, and tried not to think about David. Tried not to think about his hearteningly curious reception of the CD, or the way he had spent most of the morning checking that every Santa hat in the store was quirkily off-kilter by just the right amount, or how much Patrick _longed_ to watch his shy and uptight business partner let loose and belt out some Mariah already.

No, he wasn’t thinking about that. They might not even be listening to his CD. Maybe they had just pulled up the song on Youtube or Spotify or something; surely, it was a Rose family staple after all.

Patrick, well, Patrick was just inputting the numbers. Into the spreadsheet. Putting that number… into that box… or- wait – was it that number? Was it that box? The data seemed to swim before his eyes as his heart began to race. The first rendition was ending and… yes, there it was, beginning again.

He got out of the chair and began to pace. His mind turned irretrievably to David. To the moment he had first realised he might have begun to _like_ David. To the early mornings in his car letting the freezing air in to try and shock his system into figuring this damn thing out. To the hot flushes he got when he thought about wanting to kiss those pouting lips, or linger in a hug, or pull one of those damned sweaters over David’s head and lift up his shirt and –

And, well, he had to start somewhere, and for _some_ ungodly reason the Spirit of Christmas had inspired him to pick _here._ With a plan that now that he thought about it, couldn’t have been any more impossibly vague if he’d tried. He could hear David and Stevie talking now under the music. Were they figuring it out? Were they wondering if it was a glitch? A mistake? At first, he’d thought being able to play this thing off as a joke would have been an advantage. Now, the thought that David might not understand – that he might have another… however long, to wait, before he got up the courage to reveal himself again in a more obvious way – if he were being honest, it was kind of killing him.

“Maybe I should just tell him,” he whispered to himself.

It didn’t sound _that_ ridiculous out loud.

-

“Okay,” Stevie announced, when the song began for the third time. “I love ya, Mariah, but three times is too many.”

“My store, my rules,” David corrected.

“My finger on the play button,” Stevie pointed out, and pulled up a new playlist in the online search bar. The synthesiser intro of Wham’s 1984 pop classic _Last Christmas_ started up and she smiled as David groaned out loud.

Then she peered at the track list of Patrick’s alleged ‘mix’ CD, scrolling all the way down, and noticed – “Hey, I think this whole thing is Mariah Carey.”

“Of course it is. Because she’s amazing, and Patrick is very attentive.”

“No, I mean, every single song on here is _All I Want for Christmas._ There’s like… fifteen of them. Look. _”_

She picked up the laptop and carried it over to David, frowning. David glanced over her shoulder toward the back room. Could Patrick hear them? Did he know? Had he done this on purpose?

“Maybe it’s like, a mistake. The CD’s glitching or something,” Stevie suggested. “How up to date is your software?”

“Maybe he’s… making fun of me.” Something felt hollow in his chest at the thought.

“That doesn’t sound very Patrick-y,” Stevie pointed out. “Maybe… he likes you.”

“Oh, pfft.”

“I mean, come on, a mix tape?”

“Um, I don’t think so. We’ve been over this, remember? He’s a baseball-playing, denim-wearing, straight, _guy_ , okay, and I’ve developed enough crushes on straight guys to know how this works.”

“Did… any of those straight guys give you a mix tape full of Mariah Carey singing about how much she wants you?”

He couldn’t even will up a scoff to retort to that, and Stevie raised a confident eyebrow.

“’cause, I mean,” she continued, “most of the uh, ‘baseball playing denim wearing straight’ guys I know don’t like Mariah Carey. Or at least, they wouldn’t be caught dead admitting to another human being that they know who she is.”

“That’s not-“ David blundered, “Music doesn’t- Patrick doesn’t-“

But he couldn’t get out of his head, how deliberate Patrick was. The man thought about everything, and when he wanted something, he went for it. Researched intensively, but went for it. David admired that about his business acumen, as well as for general personality-having purposes – it was one of the reasons they balanced each other out so well – but more than anything, that told him it wasn’t a mistake. Patrick liked music, and he liked genuine connection. He would have sat there all night if that’s what it took to put together a CD, Christmas-themed or otherwise. And if the CD was glitching, the track list wouldn’t show every song the same. And if it was a joke, Patrick probably would have got David to play it in front of him, maybe tried to make him sing along.

And if none of this meant anything, Patrick wouldn’t be standing in the doorway on his way from the storeroom, trying to look determined and yet shaking like a leaf.

“Da- David,” he managed at last. “Can I talk to you?”

“That’s my cue,” Stevie murmured, and pulled back to escape the conversation. In her haste, she caught herself in the string of lights that was currently knotted between David’s fingers, and pulled. He yelped and pivoted to try and keep up and she panicked as the step ladder began to fall under the rapid change of weight. All of a sudden it was too late to untangle and there was no way of helping David without sacrificing the laptop, not that she could think of fast enough anyway, so Stevie cowered out of the way and clenched her eyes shut and hoped it wouldn’t end in disaster.

It didn’t. At least, the crashing sound wasn’t _quite_ as horrendous as she’d thought and wasn’t followed by the string of cursing she expected from the upturned David Rose. She cracked an eye open (maybe he was fine, but maybe he’d cracked his head on a display table, was she ready for that?) and found –

And found Patrick had rushed forward at the last minute, and David had all but face-planted straight into his arms. David’s feet were still not quite under him, and he gazed up at Patrick with big, wide eyes in bewildered, vulnerable admiration. Patrick, for his part, was looking down at David in a stunned sort of silence, with a blush so furious it was colouring his ears, and yet there was tenderness in his expression and his hand on David’s back was so gentle and soft, Stevie could hardly look. Did they even know she was still here?

“Uh… thuh… thanks,” David managed at last, once his tongue started working again. His heart hammered against Patrick’s chest, and Patrick’s was hammering back.

“No problem,” Patrick said, and there was more, so much more on the tip of his tongue. His lips struggled to form the words. _I like you, I want to kiss you. I want you right now._ It sounded so childish, so far short of capturing the overwhelming feelings that seized him. And maybe he would have gone another however long without saying anything at all, if it weren’t for the fact that David chose now of all moments to ask –

“Was there, um, something you wanted to tell me?”

He looked… hopeful? Patrick hardly dared hope back. But David was smiling. He _knew._

And when Patrick took a chance and seized his jittering confidence with both hands and closed the distance between them, David kissed back with a yearning that had been screaming to break out of his chest since the moment they’d met. Patrick could hardly believe the energy of it. It felt… like fireworks. Like a moment suspended in time. Like everything he’d ever been told this moment was supposed to feel like.

Then David’s lips were suddenly falling away from his. He’d tried to move his arms, forgetting that his feet weren’t yet on solid ground, and now the string of curses fell from his lips as he tumbled to the ground, hit his elbow with a _crack_ on the nearby table, and rolled onto his back.

 _“Mother…”_ he groaned.

And yet still, he was smiling.

Because Patrick had caught him. Patrick had kissed him.

_Patrick._

David opened his eyes, and looked up at the poor man, who had blanched white as a sheet as his somehow-perfect moment had come crashing down around him.

“Um, so, I- I like you,” Patrick explained. “That’s what I wanted to say.”

“Yeah, no, I got that,” David agreed, reflecting on the breathlessness in his chest. He could do that again. A few dozen more times.

“Can I help you up?”

“Yeah. Yes. Let’s do that.”

David tried not to stare at Patrick’s shoulder as Patrick offered a hand, and lifted him to his feet. He didn’t try very hard, to be fair.

“Can I buy you dinner?” Patrick asked.

“I would like that.”

“Huh.” Patrick smiled. He was on a roll. The whole thing felt rather dizzying, but it was all so much easier than he’d expected. Although, he wasn’t exactly sure what to do next. Kiss David again? They were at work, and he hadn’t exactly recovered from the first time. But he couldn’t go back to the spreadsheets now. Sure, they were important, but they weren’t like _this._ He had way too much energy all of a sudden, and a craving to run up a mountain.

But a quiet clearing of a throat interrupted his grander plans. Both Patrick and David turned to the sound, to find Stevie standing gingerly amidst a tangle of fairy lights, which seemed to tie her every movement either to the stepladder, or to the two large bookshelves on either side of her.

“Uh, congratulations and all,” she said as meekly as possible, “but before you guys split, could you help me out?”


End file.
